This is something i sometimes feel while struggling with a foreign language.

Working with her, making the new sounds, watching her lips, repeating words and syllables, hearing his own flat voice take on texture and dimension, he could almost believe he was being remade on the spot, given an opening to some larger and deeper version of himself. The language had a size to it, a deep-reaching honesty.

There is in “personalization” something similar to that “naturalization” effect we constantly meet in the environment-the effect which consists in restoring nature as sign after it has been eliminated in reality. Thus, for example, a forest is cut down to build a group of buildings, which are given the name “Park Estate” and a few trees are planted to create a “natural” feel. (…)

The general process can be defined historically:it is industrial monopoly concentration which, abolishing the real differences between human beings, homogenizing persons and products, simutaneously ushers in the reign of differentiation. Things are much the same here as with religious or social movements: it is upon the ebbing of their original impulse that churches or institutions are built. Here, too, it is upon the loss of differences that the cult of difference is founded. (…)

When a Minister emerges for instance in defence to the right to clean air that signifies the loss of clear air as a natural good, its transition to commodity status and its inegalitarian social redistribution

Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became.

“[…] it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.”

I sensed nearly at once that Elster was resisting. Something was being subverted here, his traditional language of response. Stillborn images, collapsing time, an idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate, just crisp rejection. Out on the street he spoke at last, mostly about his aching knee. No film, no chance, not ever.

I began to think that perhaps what brought us together was none other than a longing to lie low with someone desperate to do the same, someone who asked for very little and might offer a great deal provided you never asked- we were like two convalescents comparing temperature charts, swapping medications, one and the same blanket on both our laps, happy we’d found each other and ready to open up in ways we’d seldom done before, provided each knew convalescence didn’t last forever.